2019 Kaohsiung Awards

2019.02.02 - 2019.03.30 KMFA Galleries 401-403


With this year as its 23rd anniversary since its establishment in 1997, the Kaohsiung Awards has both witnessed the art development in Kaohsiung over the past years but also reflected the most current art development trends in southern Taiwan. It also aspires to guide and shape the future development of art in Kaohsiung or even Taiwan. To fulfill this vision and ideal, the preparation committee of the Kaohsiung Awards each year not only reviews the previous Kaohsiung Awards but also has careful deliberation on how to hold the upcoming Kaohsiung Awards, discussing issues such as categorization of submitted works, naming of media categories, and how to increase the exposure and added values for the Kaohsiung Awards winners. All these efforts are intended to ensure that the Kaohsiung Awards can stay in line with the most current art development and maintain its forward-looking insights into Taiwan’s art.
 
Inheriting the spirit of openness and progressive improvement from all its precedents, the 2019 Kaohsiung Awards has undergone high-profile and significant changes in its rules and regulations. While maintaining the mechanism of reviewing and selecting the submitted works all together in the preliminary and final reviews regardless of their category differences, the 2019 Kaohsiung Awards has raised the money prizes for the winners, opened up to applicants who have residence permits in Taiwan, and streamlined the eight categories of submitted works into five categories. In addition, applicants are allowed to submit only one work or a set of works in the 2019 Kaohsiung Awards instead of three works/sets as in the past. To all the participants, these changes are unprecedented and unfamiliar; to the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA), these changes are also a brand-new experiment and challenge. To a certain extent, these changes manifest the organic flexibility in the application and selection mechanism of the Kaohsiung Awards.
 
Totally 786 works/sets of works were submitted to the 2019 Kaohsiung Awards. In addition to three Kaohsiung Awards winners, five winners of the Excellent Work Award, 17 winners of the Finalist Award, and one winner of the HCS Special Award for Calligraphy/Seal-engraving Works were also selected. In their winning works, the three Kaohsiung Awards winners skillfully use the unique characteristics of different media to express their inner inquiries based on their life experiences. In her Sunlight on the Dust I and Wabi-sabi Solitude, Chen Yu-yu uses subtle brushstrokes to refer to a kind of individual perceptions and also to shed light on some thoughts hidden in the dark corner of her life. Wu Chia-yun combines rugged wood boards and impurity-laced daily images to represent the conflicts and loneliness in real life through the transition back and forth between reality and virtuality, between sense and sensibility. In his Gevær (Rifle), Chang Chih-chung overlays, reassembles, and reconstructs his own experiences of sailing in Norway with a historical incident to create a dialogue between two narratives from two different times and spaces in the celluloid projection.
 
The major changes in the 2019 Kaohsiung Awards reflect KMFA’s constant dedication to exploring how to help artists freely and fully demonstrate their artistic concepts in the diverse environment of contemporary art through the Kaohsiung Awards as an evolving platform with gradually improvements in its mechanism of work application and selection. The Kaohsiung Awards will definitely not stop with these changes. In addition to continuously paying attention and responding to the diverse development of contemporary art in Kaohsiung and Taiwan, the Kaohsiung Awards also hopes that all the winning artists will continue tirelessly with their pursuits of artistic creation, proudly carrying the Kaohsiung Awards as their badge of honor.